Module 2 Question 3

Module 2 Question 3

I found the electronic index (PubMed) user friendly in that with time and some precision a great database could be created. In contrast, I thought the NGC website was a little more difficult to use as I found very little information there and really had to twist my words around to get it to retrieve anything useful. A lot of the info gathered through this tool mentioned AIDS and/or Homeless. It just now came to me that I could have tried the word not and then attached AIDS or Homeless, but still I think that would have narrowed my search to three whole items. On the other hand, NGC had the best “How to Search” information, even better than the readings. I also added this site to “my favorites.” The Google search for “prevalence of adult prescription drug abuse + rural community” provided way too much info (like over 20,000 publishing’s). However, it did list “Scholarly Articles” as the first link to information. When I chose this link I had approximately 7,010 articles to choose from in less than 0.08 seconds. I attempted to narrow this search via the use of the “+” sign (like, prevalence + rural prescription drug abuse + adult and prescription drug abuse + rural community+ adult) and it didn’t seem to help much.

Context relevant information retrieval would be useful. I noticed that in PubMed, my articles contained many MeSH words that one could choose to either broaden or modify their search. MeSH takes the word “drug” and associates it to other words within the same context, i.e., oxycodone, and opiods. A skilled user could easily develop a great library/database.